WON FOR ALL, ALL FOR ONE

“Whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
– Doris Lessing

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Doris Lessing before this week. A Nobel Prize winning novelist. I know I’ve never read her books. But this quote that I encountered on social media has stuck with me. Man, I love it.

Conditions are impossible. They’re always gonna be impossible. Do it anyway.

It’s got grit — mustering perseverance, determination, and willpower.

It’s also a call of faith — to open our hearts to something that glimmers beyond what we’ve already figured-out, beyond what we’ve already experienced and already known. Beyond what’s reasonable. Living into something new.

And it feels like the heart of creativity. Doing it anyway.

I’m thinking about what it means to win and the role of faith in the process.

We can think of winning as a zero-sum game in which one’s gain spells another’s loss. Some situations are in fact set up like this, and it’s not inherently a “bad” thing. It does get pretty miserable, however, if we adopt it as a measure for self-worth, a model for relationships, or a condition of satisfaction, accomplishment, success, and our sense of purpose.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with getting a trophy or a blue ribbon. Congratulations! AND — winning can be so much bigger that that. Winning can mean facing our fears, pushing through perceived limitations. It might simply be trying something new, and letting it not matter at all whether or not we’re “good” at it. It can have less to do with willpower and more to do with willingness — attempting the impossible, being audaciously self-expressed, unreasonably kind, radically accepting. It might mean failing. Allowing even blunders to feel spectacular and triumphant.

Winning definitely doesn’t have to mean that someone loses.

The Buddha said, “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken away from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.”

Not to quibble with the Buddha, but let me suggest that victory is not just yours, but is in fact everybody’s any time any one of us approaches it this way. Also, I probably wouldn’t choose the word “conquer.”

This kind of victory takes faith. Which is, by definition, unreasonable.

We’re still going to have doubts and fears, of course. Faith includes them, and we do it anyway. We’ve got so many beliefs, both inspiring and limiting, and faith works with those, too. Hopes and frustrations, problems and solutions, earned wisdom and bitter experience. Faith can be the container, the context, in which all that we are dances and learns and grows.

Inviting us beyond, perpetually beyond, our pesky, impossible conditions.

I can’t wait to be with you this Sunday, May 31, 10:00am at q-Staff Theatre. With the divine Patty Stephens, whose birthday is today!

XO, Drew